I read an article in the Sunday magazine of the New York Times recently, by a guy who didn't believe in romantic love, and it set me to thinking about the whole subject. It was hardly a new idea. He maintained that romantic love was basically a construct manufactured by poets and the writers of the Romantic period, and enshrined in modern life through pop culture, especially television and movies.

When I've heard this in the past, I've almost automatically dismissed it in an almost knee-jerk reaction. To be honest, it's an idea that nagged at me, and I didn't want to think about it too much in case I found the argument convincing. But I've often thought about something else that has troubled me. When I think back through my history of friendships, there have been here and there a few people for whom I had no real physical attraction, yet for whom I seemed to feel something more than just friendship.

Take my friend James, for example. While, in his case, there was definitely an initial, strong physical attraction when I first met him eight years ago. But, since I'm too rational to be foolish about such things, that attraction was long since put aside due to James' resolute heterosexuality. I don't see James all that often, yet whenever I do, I feel a special glow. And I find I really care about him; I want to hear about his family and his problems, and want to help. I almost feel like I would do anything for him. And that's certainly not the way I feel about most of my friends.

So getting back to the mental problem I alluded to earlier: I used to wonder just where my feelings for a few friends like James fit into my model of what you might call "friendship-family-love". I don't have romantic love for such friends, and he's not family, yet I feel stronger affection than for most of my other friends.

After reading the New York Times magazine, I tossed the whole mix around in my head for a few days, and began to realize that I'd possibly had a terribly simplistic view of friendship-family-love. I'm a big one, I'm afraid to tell you, for forming my own pet philosophical theories about "Life, the Universe and Everything" (remind me to tell you one day about why I think parenting is the most selfish act a person can engage in!). So my new pet idea is that the family of feelings that span friendship, love and affection can perhaps be categorized by a number of axes, or dimensions. Imagine the corner of a cube: axes move away in three directions; along one direction is admiration, along another is familiarity and acceptance, and along another is physical attraction.

Now try to plot such things as romantic-love, and familial-love, and friendship using this system of axes. My feelings for friends like James involve the admiration axis, with a bit of the familiarity-and-acceptance axis, thrown in. Where does ordinary friendship fit: well, plenty of familiarity-and-acceptance, and, oh ... I suppose I need a fourth axis: compatibility. (This theory is clearly a work-in-progress!)

Now for the biggy: where does romantic-love fit in? I'm beginning to think that it's just a mixture of admiration, and lust. And on top of that, we've all built this incredible idea that romantic love is supposed to be one of the big goals of life.